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ten years his junior.
    Eleanor Collins was the daughter of a hardware store proprietor from Great Falls and had just finished her training as a physical therapist. Buck was one of her first patients.
    He had strained a shoulder hauling a broken hay wagon from a creek. The last time he had come to the clinic he’d been stretched and pummeled by an older woman whom he’d later mocked as having the looks and charm of a Russian tank commander. So when he saw this young goddess step through the door of the consulting room, he thought she must be an assistant or nurse.
    She wore a white coat that fitted close enough to show Buck’s practiced eye the kind of figure he liked best, slim and lithe and full-breasted. She had skin like ivory and long black hair, held up with tortoiseshell combs. She didn’t return his smile, just fixed him with her wonderful green eyes, asked him what the trouble was and told him to take off his shirt. Dear Lord, Buck thought, as he unbuttoned, it’s like something you read about in Playboy magazine.
    Had Eleanor Collins succumbed to the charm he instantly applied, had she agreed to meet him for a cup of coffee at lunchtime, had she so much as smiled even once, things might have turned out differently.
    Months later she would tell him that she’d been nervous as a chipmunk that day; that as soon as she’d laid eyes on him, she’d thought this was the man for her and how hard it had been to mask her feelings with professional cool. As it was, Buck left the clinic with both his shoulder and his heart aglow. And from the latter alone, he knew this was more than just another buck-and-chuck, for normally he felt the glow in a baser place. No. He had met, at last, the woman he would marry.
    Of the cautionary signs to which Eleanor might have paid heed, perhaps the most telling was the quiet, resigned sadness in the eyes of Buck’s mother. It could have shown her what grim toll there was to pay for living with a firstborn male Calder. But Eleanor saw in her future mother-in-law only a shared and understandable adoration for this handsome, charming power-house of a man, a man who had chosen her from all the women in the world to share his life and bear his children.
    Her refusal to sleep with him before they were married only stoked Buck’s passion all the more. Eleanor remained a virgin until their wedding night, whereupon she dutifully conceived. It was a boy. His name was not up for discussion. Two daughters, Lane and Kathy, followed at intervals of roughly two years.
    ‘Only breed your best cow every other year,’ Buck said to his drinking pals at The Last Resort. ‘That’s the way to get prime beef.’
    It was a description that he could honestly apply to the first three of his children. Henry IV was a firstborn Calder to the core and sometimes when the two of them were out hunting or rounding up cattle or fixing a fence, Buck would shake his head with pride at the boy’s easy, unwitting emulation.
    Dear Lord, he thought, the power of the seed. And then he’d look at young Luke and think again.
    This second son didn’t look like a Calder at all. It had taken Eleanor four years to have him and during that time something seemed to have happened to the Calder genes. The boy was the image of his mother: the pale Irish skin, the dark hair, the same watchful green eyes.
    ‘Well, he sure is his mother’s son,’ Buck joked in the hospital when he first laid eyes on the child. ‘No telling who his daddy is though.’ And ever since, even in front of the boy, he’d gone on referring to Luke as ‘your son’.
    It was said in jest, of course. He was far too proud to think that any man would dare cuckold him or that any woman of his would allow it. But secretly he felt his genes had somehow been denied access to the boy. Or worse, that they had been admitted and failed. And he felt this even before Luke began to stutter.
    ‘Ask for it properly,’ Buck would tell him at the table. He didn’t